Start Page for Zoho

Online office tools provider Zoho today released a beta version of Zoho Start, a launch pad for Zoho’s suite of office applications. Zoho currently offers a suite of 16 separate apps and utilities, and while they have a common login, there was nothing really tying them together as a single office suite. There was no easy way to access your spreadsheets and word processing documents from a single space, for example.

Zoho Start is what the company is calling a first step “towards integrating Zoho Apps under a single page.” The page currently aggregates files from Zoho Writer, Sheet, and Show and lets users organize them into folders, as well as share, tag, import, and export documents via a common interface. Zoho Start also draws a list of contacts from Zoho Chat, and a features a launcher for their entire application suite.

MyLiveSearch public release announced

MyLiveSearch has officially announced its public release which is scheduled to be on August 29. MyLiveSearch, which claims to be the world’s first live search engine, is the brainchild of software developer Rob Gabriel.

Google’s search engine works by building a vast index of web pages, via automated “spiders” that crawl through billions of web pages a year. However this represents only a fraction of the enormous, sprawling internet, and the index can never be entirely up to date.

Yahoo! search and Microsoft’s Live search work the same way.

MyLiveSearch is fundamentally different. It works through a small browser plug-in. The search terms are put through Google, or other indexed search databases, but those results are treated as “starting points” alongside the user’s bookmarks and other popular web hubs.

From there, the live search takes over, crawling through hundreds of web pages connected to those starting points in search of more information relevant to the search.

Mr Gabriel says the results come back in seconds, and are almost always richer, more detailed and more useful than a standard, index-based search.

IBM Desktop Hindi Speech Recognition Software launched in India

Software giant IBM has developed a speech recognition software in Hindi. The company hopes that this development will help physically challenged and less literate Hindi speakers to access information using a variety of applications.Called the Desktop Hindi Speech Recognition technology, this software was developed by the IBM India Software Lab jointly with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.

The IBM Desktop Hindi Speech Recognition software is capable of recognizing over 75,000 Hindi words with dialectical variations, providing an accuracy of 90 to 95%. What’s more; this software also has an integrated spellchecker that corrects spoken-word errors, enhancing the accuracy to a great extent.

The Desktop Hindi Speech Recognition Technology also integrates a number of user-friendly features such as the facility to convert text to digits and decimals, date and currency format, and into fonts which could be imported to any Windows-based application.

YouTube adds a new feature – Buffer anywhere

Now you can move the YouTube video playhead to any location in the timeline and the video will begin to stream from that position itself – you no longer have to wait for the entire video clip to load.

Thanks Google!

Geni – We Are All Related

Geni’s premise is very simple. We are all related. This idea, while theoretically feasible, has resulted in a family tree website where you map your family tree visually. If you’ve tried to create a family tree earlier – either on paper or in MS Word or MS Excel – you would have realized how painfully-difficult and error-prone it is.

Geni hits that exact problem on the head, and all you need to do is follow the visual clues to create your own family tree. What’s more, you can invite all your relatives via e-mail to join the tree. And your relatives can in turn invite their relatives to join the tree – and pretty soon you realize that your family is way bigger than you thought it possible. The data entry can be kept to a minimum – name, email address and relationship to another person in your tree – if you feel this is the way to go, or you can fill in as much detail as you wish. You can add your picture (so far-flung relatives will finally know what you look like).

Alexa Rankings: YouTube is bigger than Google?

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch made an interesting discovery a while ago. According to the Alexa web ranking website, YouTube now has more pageviews than Google. Which of course is impossible…

If you had any doubts about Alexa’s reliability for traffic measurement, then you shouldn’t any longer. As Arrington says, and I support, the new Compete website provides a much more realistic figure.